Tuesday, July 13, 2010

A bit of a different Going Pro article: a situation online has provided us with an interesting thought experiment.
The past week, a large portion of the science blogosphere has been shifting. I won't re-hash all the many posts and positions, but here's a brief summary as I understand it.

The ScienceBlogs.com network run by SEED Media has over 70 bloggers running their independent blogs (no editors, just bloggers) talking about science, and whatever other issues they like (atheism, gender issues, movies, shoes, politics and much more). Scienceblogs.com put up a new blog, one paid for and run by Pepsico, to discuss advances in nutrition science.

Some bloggers felt betrayed: like Pepsico was buying credibility on the reputation the network had built up (it's indexed on Google News). Others thought it was no big deal, they hadn't posted yet; wait for them to get out of line and address it. Some complained about "Pepsi" and "nutrition". Others cited this being the last straw in a number of complaints, some behind-the-scenes, and some public. A significant number of popular bloggers have left the network, including Laelaps by paleo-writer Brian Switek.

Now, here's the sauropod-meat of this article. What would the various fans, contributors and artists here in the ART Evolved community do in a similar situation?

We're a smaller operation. A large number of artists and illustrators and occasional posters but all on one blog. We've all invested some of our online identity into this group, and most regular contributors have their own blogs. It's a loose network, but one I am proud to be a part of.

So, what if Peter, Craig and I announced one day, we were going to have one post a month from a corporate blogger, and they were giving money to us to maintain and keep AE afloat? What if, the science-artsy street-cred of the corporate blogger seemed questionable: a new Flintstones-type of unscientific t.v. series that popularized misconceptions about the prehistoric past, (we could call it "Man & Dino", both sexist and inaccurate) and the articles seemed cobbled together by out of touch marketers?

What would you do? As a reader, ignore those posts? Ask for "paid advertisement" on the "Man & Dino" posts? Not care, so long as it helped keep ART Evolved going?

There's not a right answer in my mind: I have respect and see the points of people on both sides of the Pepsi divide. But here at ART Evolved, what would you do?

Monday, July 12, 2010

Professional Hollywood production artist Peter Von Sholly has for the past couple of months been featuring a fun series of prehistoric themed adventures of TuxfordNoodlefactor and his faithful dog Hounduu.

However despite all the effort poor Peter has put into both the art and the sharing of it with us online, few have given him any support or kind words in his comment section. Which has caused him to feel no one wishes to see this work, which I think is a shame as they are really cute and well done.

Please pop over to his blog and immediately check out:

The Dinosaur Hunter posted in its entirety(This link is just to the front cover. He doesn't have a label up I can link to. If you hit "Newer Post" on all these posts you'll be taken to all the new pages in order)

and Dinosaur Circus only half posted (This link again is only just to the front cover, so likewise hit "Newer Post" on all these posts to be taken to the next page)

So do please pop over, check these out, and most important let Peter know if you like his work or not!

However in a recent post it was mistakenly typed as artevoled @blogspot.com. This is not a real address and emails sent there will just vanish into the ether of cyberspace.

If you sent in a piece to our recent Trilobite Gallery but it hasn't been posted, you probably followed our false instructions. Again our apologies.

In fairness to the poor administrators, in their efforts to advertise and promote this site they type both the email address artevolved@gmail.com and the website address www.blogevolved.blogspot.coman awful lot. There was bound to be a slight mix up/blending eventually. At the same time we know it may cause a couple people a slight pain.

Hopefully we'll learn from this mistake and it won't happen again!

Also be sure to recheck out the Trilobite Gallery, as a few new "misplaced" pieces have finally made their way into the Gallery.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

A classic fossil from around the world, the trilobite are a group of extinct arthropod, which survived from the earliest Cambrian to the Permian mass extinction, with most groups going extinct in the Devonian. Where they come from is a mystery; Trilobites were already widely diverse and geographically dispersed when they first show up in the Cambrian Explosion.

Having a hard exoskeleton allowed them to leave a vast and extensive fossil record, allowing scientists to use trilobites as fossil markers in determining the stratigraphic of the Cambrian, as evidence for continental drift, and data for testing the Punctuated Equilibrium mechanism for evolution.

And if you live in Ohio, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, then trilobites are your state fossil! But as this is the July 1st Gallery, then a Happy Canada Day to you all too!

Continue down to open the Trilobite Time Capsule, and marvel at the treasures inside...

(Click on the picture to enlarge it, and click on the names to view the artist's site!)

As pointed out by Sam Gon II on his excellent Trilobite website,
there are several species of trilobite with huge dome-like cephalic
chambers. In addition, the bodies of these animals, if extended
straight back, would hang significantly far above the sediment. Both
features suggest that these trilobites may have been filter feeders
that used the gills on their elevated thorax and pygidium to sweep
plankton into the cephalic chamber for processing. Here I have
depicted one such trilobite based on a drawing from Gon's website.

The Olenina includes several species from rock layers that were
formerly sulfur-rich deep sea habitats. Modern-day animals living in
these kinds of habitats often form symbiotic relationships with
sulfur-fixing bacteria, so it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that
deep-dwelling Olenids had similar relationships. Evidence for this
symbiosis can be found in the large gills found in some well-preserved
fossils, since gills are often where the sulfur-eating bacteria live
in modern organisms. These fossils also frequently possess an
increased number of body segments (and thus an increased number of
gills) as well as highly-reduced mouthparts (since most of their
nutrition would come from the bacteria).
Here I've depicted one such symbiotic trilobite crawling over the
sea floor near a colony of prehistoric tube-worms. The brown
clam-like creatures in the foreground are deep-sea brachiopods, while
the blue fish swimming overhead are Ctenurella, a species of
placoderms that convergently evolved to resemble modern-day chimeras.

This is a pen drawing I wanted to get a sort of sci-fi alien look, so I heavily textured the picture, adding the sort of detail a paleo-teacher would go mad about, marking you down heavily for obscuring the structure!

I love making things out of polymer clays, little sculptures out of things like fimo, this trilobite is 2 inches or 5 cm long, I made each segment and constructed it from the bits thinking about how trilobites are actually structured. I have photographed it on a weathered concrete base to give it a bottom of the sea look.

Trilobites are amazingly diverse so I wanted to capture the idea of a trilobite lead eco-system with them as the grazers, scavengers, filter feeders, hunters, burrowers etc... covering the different sections of the water column and the different habitat niches. The trilobites I have drawn probably did not all exist together as represented here.

The carcass of the large (for its time) Odaraia falls to the Cambrian ocean floor relatively intact. Attracting many of the large (again for their time) trilobite Olenoides to feast on the remains. Dinomischus filter feed in the distance, while a swarm of Marrella swim overhead.

Note from the artist- This piece really has turned out to be a disappointment. I might revisit it when I have the time. I have just started a very full on 6 day a week job, and have spent the whole month of June moving on top of that... So hopefully one day when I'm not so busy I'll be able to do this concept justice.

A unintentional but neat mistake on the piece above. It makes me wonder how many of the great works of art created throughout the ages were accidents that looked cool. Yet were never intended by the artist...

I'm a big fan of prehistoric invertebrates and I wanted to share their wonder with other people by personifying them. Trilobites are more than just fossils, they were once living things making their way in the world just like anyone else.

The teeming trilobite sea floor in the Devonian period, time of some of the weirdest and most extreme trilobite species that ever evolved. Location is a continental shelf in Morocco, around 400 million years ago.

Phacops rana, a middle Devonian phacopid with large eyes and an uncanny ability to roll into a defensive curl and become buried in sediment. Pencil on paper

Hope we've all molted successfully! If you have a trilobite you'd like to include in this Time Capsule, these galleries accept pieces anytime - just send them in to artevolved@gmail.com!

BUT THERE'S MORE!

Must go faster!!!

The next gallery defies strict science and lets the imagination soar!

This summer brings you our first Pop Culture Gallery!!! Use your pencils and pixels to pay homage to your favorite famous monsters or create your own! Send them in to ART Evolved and we'll open the Time Capsule on September 1st 2010!